Maria Tumarkin

What a time to be reading about Annie Ernaux’s self-obliterating affair with S from the Soviet embassy in Paris, not that you’d sense that something’s in the air from the English-language reception to Getting Lost, Ernaux’s diary of the relationship, published in English last September. In the diary and in its generally admiring reviews S is described as a diplomat, apparatchik, attaché, ‘faithful servant of the USSR’ (Ernaux) and Brezhnev nostalgic/Stalin apologist when drunk. Also: ‘He is somewhat, not to say very, anti-Semitic: “Isn’t Mitterrand Jewish?” ’ Pretty standard stuff. Come on. He would have been KGB.

How to describe the current motherhood-memoir nexus? Owing to commercial pressures, nonfiction books by women writers dealing in any way with motherhood are unlikely to be sold as books of thinking, exploration, reportage, cultural critique or all the above. Instead they are dubbed motherhood memoirs. At the same time writing about mothering has become constrained, made predictable, by certain memoiristic tropes, vocabularies, intensities and scales. I don’t want to make any big declarations about how when you spit in a bookshop you hit a memoir, except to note it’s not only women, it’s brain surgeons, the children of spies, young writers with hybrid identities, survivors of trauma, each getting pushed down the memoir route by their publishers or agents or maybe by their own sense of what kind of books are possible and wanted.

Reading Hofmann has made me wonder whether I got the business of literary criticism wrong. All that straining, for instance: to find meaning and connections, to locate, link up. Why is it a self-evident good? Or the need to be careful, so careful, as in restrained, measured, fair but also taking care of people’s feelings because it’s the right thing to do and because, a separate point this, people break themselves in half to write their books.

What are essays for? They are for thinking about things that need to be thought about yet don’t get thought about much, or at all, or interestingly, or for long enough. They are for picking up ideas, feelings, forces in the air, still unnamed and amorphous, and giving them a foothold in language. Whatever is in the air and whatever is disappearing – unnoticed, unmourned. They are for resisting choices offered to us that are not true, yet made to seem inescapable.

Chast burrows into this feral old age and draws it out with uncanny, page-expanding, emotional precision. It is not reporting from the trenches, or a facing-down of the last frontier, but something else. Chast is giving over a whole multi-tracked, multi-voiced, sensory feast of a book to something – something barely bearable sometimes, and infused with pain and dread always; something that gets sprinted past, or poeticised to within an inch of its life, or else chronicled with a deadly, breathless earnestness – and she does it in such a way that I could not tear myself away from her book.

The work of ‘proving a hypothesis’ could hardly be more alien to Tumarkin. Instead, she is concerned with examining difficult events and experiences: paying attention, being emotionally and intellectually active, while refusing to let the consequences of tragedy, bravery, cruelty, care, or indifference go unnoticed, unexamined or unfelt.